On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 07:59:14AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote: > Andreas Cadhalpun <andreas.cadhalpun@googlemail.com> writes: > > Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that if one uses the source of a > > GPL licensed program to build another program, this has to be > > distributed under the GPL as well. (Section 2. b) of the GPL) > That's roughly correct; the act which requires licensing the whole work > under GPL is to distribute a “derivative work” of the prior GPL-licensed > work; see <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work>. > The corollary is that if the derived work is not distributed under terms > compatible with the GPL, the recipient has *no* effective license in > the work – and, indeed, the party redistributing has no license to do > so, and is themselves violating the GPL of the prior work. > > If that is true, is it allowed to simply use the chroma source, as if > > the COPYING contained the GPL v2, or is it necessary to contact the > > author of chroma and request a change of the COPYING file? > If their work is derived from a work they received under GPL, then > “chroma” may be redistributed only under GPL-compatible terms (e.g., the > GPL itself), otherwise they are violating copyright on the GPL-licensed > work and “chroma” recipients have no effective license. There is no credible legal theory that would hold that the source of chroma is a derivative work of the bundled GPL sources. There is only an issue with distributing the bundled work if you distribute it as a binary. So this makes the package undistributable for Debian, but not necessarily for upstream. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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